First order placed as promised! Thanks, edd.

Why not just buy on BitcoinMarket?

I suggest you sign up with BitcoinMarket. The prices for BTC against PPUSD are by definition as competitive as you'll find.

Things like this have to be looked at proportionally. It's easy to look at 50x parity and think "Whoa, that's $40 away," instead of, "Oh, a 400% increase." We've seen 400% increases in the course of two weeks before.

Upper bound: January 31.

Lower bound: June 11.

Neener!

Mia sperto estas ke la plejparto da Esperantistoj estas almenaŭ iom socialismaj, kaj multaj estas eĉ malnovmodaj komunistoj, dum la plejparto da Bitcoinistoj estas radike kapitalismaj. Ĉu tio estas la sperto de aliaj ankaŭ? Se jes, Bitcoin ne atingos grandan popularecon en la Esperanto-komunumo.

Jason: What software are you using? If you use the command-line GPG, by default it will generate keys that can be used for encryption. But if you're using Cryptophane for example, by default it generates signature-only keys. Unfortunately I haven't found the perfect Windows GUI frontend for GPG yet.

You need a public and private part for signatures as well as encryption---a private part you use to sign, and a public part others use to verify the signature.

Anyway, if you have my public key, in most software signing it will mean right-clicking it and clicking "Sign". Then at some point you'd re-upload the key to the server, with your signature on it. By doing this you're vouching that that the name and email address attached to the key are accurate. (I haven't actually proven that the name is accurate, but if you really wanted I could try and scan an ID or something.)

I was reassured by your saying this, but after looking into it more I'm not so sure. The difficulty of deriving an ECDSA private key from the public comes from the difficulty of the discrete logarithm problem, and Shor's algorithm reduces that to polynomial time.

You misunderstand because you think there is some sort of extended work involved in finding a valid hash. There isn't. Each hash attempt takes something like 2-3 billionths of a second, and either succeeds or fails immediately.

As others said, it's like rolling a die over and over again until you get a 1. Only instead of the die having six sides it has 1.8 trillion. A difficulty increase is like adding more sides to the die. If you can roll the die faster you can get 1 more often, but other players/miners don't help or hinder you in this.

It doesn't, does it? But I tried typing it in two or three different ways and got an error each time.

This is pretty much what you would expect. If there were free money available, people would pile on with new GPUs to get it until the difficulty rose to the point of marginal profitability. In fact there was, and they did.

ETA: I don't think FGPAs are to blame, at least not yet. More likely it's just influx of hobbyist miners with already-owned GPUs.

Press release

Q&A with HPCwire


How does this affect the crypto used in Bitcoin? Are there known quantum algorithms for breaking ECDSA and SHA-2?

Not that he needs any more reputation, but +1 to bearbones. My BitMunchies purchase arrived quickly. What issues I did have were worked out quickly and responsibly.

I think the problem is a lot simpler. Pretend you've just been linked to Bitcoin.org from OCN or somewhere.

"All right, I want some bitcoins. Let's get mining!"

"Ah, so shouldn't mine with my CPU. So how do I get them?"

"Okay, I guess I'll just buy them. But where?"

"Hey look, this forum is called 'Buying'."

Well, it was really unlikely you'd make money that way. You were basically not betting on the outcome, but rather meta-betting that the books would be lopsided by well more than 2:1. They weren't very lopsided, so you lost.

There's no competition in the sense you're thinking. Within one difficulty period, your mining will result in the same number of bitcoins regardless of whether there are 1 or 10,000,000 other miners on the network.

Mining is competitive only because the network periodically adjusts itself by increasing the difficulty of the hashing work to be done, based on how quickly it has been done in the past. The more miners there are, the faster the work will get done. The faster the work gets done, the harder it will become in the future.

frozen, what you wrote seems pretty much correct. It's worth pointing out that the 8.5 seconds is an average, and there's a significant chance that once in a while it will take a minute or longer (or a second or less). In fact, if you're mining 24/7, that probably will happen once in a while.

And now my attempt at the OP:
Disclaimer: I don't consider myself a liberal these days, or at least I'm a pretty strange one. That said, I do want jack-booted thugs with rifles to take your money and give it to public schools. Not all of these points apply to me personally, though some of them do.

0 This is perhaps too obvious, but if I think Bitcoin has a good chance of succeeding, then whatever my political platform I will be more able to carry it out in ten years if I have some bitcoins. So even if I outright hated the idea of Bitcoin I still ought to own some.

1 You aren't describing a liberal, you're describing every ordinary person in the world. Most people want the government to control where and how others spend their money, though how they spend their own money is of course their business. Most people want everyone else to pay their fair share of taxes, though they feel like their own share is unfair. Most people want the government to stop giving handouts to the undeserving, but consider everyone they know personally to be deserving. This is called hypocrisy and it's among the most common traits found in humanity.

2 Have you considered that liberalism is perhaps a bit more complex than "The government knows best"? That at its foundation is not social control, but fairness---the radical notion that equality of opportunity is good? Fairness isn't some bizarre modern invention, it's an impulse built into our very genes. A conservative will say, "Well, the world isn't fair. Get over it." A liberal will say, "Well, the world isn't fair. Let's fix that." And in the long run, Bitcoin ought to make the world more fair, since it will reduce the ability of the already-powerful to enrich themselves every time someone wants to buy a cup of coffee. If I can easily send a few mBTC directly to a farmer in Africa, why should I let agribusinesses and warlords have their cut?

3 Large agencies and the super-wealthy already have the power to hide money, violate financial restrictions, and evade taxes through clever accounting and jurisdictional games. Therefore Bitcoin isn't giving those people anything. Instead it's giving that same power to the individuals who don't have the benefit of being born a Hilton. This is like asking why support Tor if you don't like child pornography.

4 Only the least financially savvy are foolish enough to hold their savings in cash. Generally these people are lower working class. So in practice inflation is quite a regressive tax. I don't like regressive taxes, and neither do more ordinary liberals.

5 Just because I want a big bully to extort wealth from rich people and hand it to public works and the disabled, doesn't mean I want to pretend that isn't what they're doing. I'd much rather just say, "Some big bully should extort wealth from that guy and hand it to public works and the disabled." This is because I don't like extortion in itself, and I want to remember that that's what I'm advocating. Otherwise I might find myself saying, "Some big bully should extort wealth from that guy and then pay someone to hold him captive for ten years if he smokes some pot." Bitcoin will force me to be honest, since the only way to take it by force is directly, or at least at one degree of removal through an agency like the IRS.

6 I agree with liberals that a monopoly is frequently a bad thing, and a monopoly propped up by law is pretty much always a bad thing. So why in the world would I support a legally mandated monopoly on currency production?

7 Like liberals, I support harm reduction over cracking down. If we're going to have an industry of people smuggling guns and heroin into the country, at least we don't have to have a parallel industry of people smuggling cash back out. If people are going to evade taxes, I'd prefer that they do it by hiding some cash under the bed rather than by creating a national money laundering network with all the associated violence and seediness attached.

I know of no physical limitation that says a person must inhabit a 100-liter sack of carbon and water---and I don't think circumventing that is any more "cheating" than is finding ways of growing more food on the same amount of land. This exponential trend can continue for quite a long time before we hit any hard physical limits on personhood.

Late reply, sorry. The problem with one BTC for one week is that if it works out, I won't be willing to pay that price in the long term, and if it doesn't work out, I'll regret paying the price at all. But thanks for the offer. I didn't actually know it was dangerous to set up a VPN that served people outside China!

Edited to add: My main interest is in dealing in renminbi through PayPal. I don't know whether this is permitted or not.